The piano was always at the centre of Shostakovich’s musical universe. He began to show signs of musical talent as a child, starting his first piano lessons with his mother, and immediately after leaving the Conservatoire he was ranked as a promising concert pianist.

The piano remained important to Shostakovich throughout his career: he usually played the piano parts of his chamber works and songs at their first performances, and wrote some of his most important works for the instrument, including the two concertos, the two sonatas, and the monumental set of 24 Preludes and Fugues.

Much of Shostakovich’s orchestral music was first heard in versions he prepared for piano four hands or two pianos: he routinely arranged his own symphonies to facilitate performance to friends in advance of their orchestral premieres, and for personal pleasure afterwards. This common practice was also convenient for letting Communist Party apparatchiks decide whether the work was ideologically worthy of performance.

Most of these transcriptions have languished unheard since those early performances. This series uncovers all the transcriptions prepared by Shostakovich himself, coupling them with all his original music for piano duo and duet, and contains his earliest surviving two-piano work (Suite in F sharp minor, Op.6, composed in Petrograd in March 1922 in memory of his father, who had just died) as well as dances from several of his film scores (including the little-heard Korzinkina’s Adventures, Op.59).

Jakob Fichert and Vicky Yannoula are both graduates of the Royal College of Music in London, after studies in their native countries (Fichert at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe; Yannoula, from Corfu, also studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London). Both have been awarded numerous international prizes, as soloists and as chamber musicians. This is their first recording for Toccata Classics.